Isn't that some kind of dodgy mud hut?

Kieran.Block — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 21:57:00 GMT

Adobe is right near the top of my list of software companies I hate, second only to Symantec. Why? They code crap. Acrobat is quite possibly one of the most overpriced, bloated piece of rubbish I have ever had the misfortune of using. Now I know all the anti-ms folks out there will point the finger at MS doing the same thing, but I see a huge difference. I mean, most folks would argue that Vista is overpriced and bloated - I am not trying to argue that point, but imagine, for a terrifying moment, that Adobe started making operating systems. You would be paying about $4,000 for an operating system that runs like an asthmatic pensioner carrying a disabled seal.

Now, with that argument completely killed, let's move on.

Considering that I maintain my own website and am everything to everyone in my client's eyes, I need a few things. I need to be able to make and read PDFs, I need to be able to make websites without resorting to frontpage (see my previous entry), and I need to be able to do some image editing for the websites and whatever else suddenly becomes within scope.

Adobe Acrobat, Adobe Dreamweaver, and Adobe Photoshop are the 3 that immediately jump to mind. Now, I am in no mood to waste $2,500 on buggy as hell software today, nor any other day, but I need to be able to do these things. So what is out there that can do the job?

PDF was the first hurdle. I know of open source stuff like ghostscript, but last time I played with that it was ugly as hell. I am not completely against spending money, so I raised my sights from "free" to "sensible" and came up with Nitro PDF -> http://www.nitropdf.com <- at $99 for the full fat version, and $49 for the basic version, it beats the hell out of $700! So far, it has done quite well. It starts faster than Acrobat reader, has a PDF printer and even looks like Office 2007 with the ribbon bar. I am not a fanboy yet, but the fact that it started in under 2 minutes means that it is already lightyears ahead of Adobe.

HTML was the second. There are a multitude of applications that do this, but the concensus is, you either want to use Dreamweaver or Frontpage. I may go back to Frontpage or Expression Web or whatever it is called today, but for now, I want to know that I am not going to stuff anything (my blog) up horribly. After some serious googling, I found Nvu -> http://www.nvu.com <- considering it is free, and very clean, I have to say I am quite impressed. It looks and feels familiar, which is handy - but as I completed the majority of my site hack with notepad, I will have to wait and see how we go. Another $715 saved.

Finally, we had Image Editing. This I thought would be the hardest, I knew that Photoshop was good, and I knew that it was complicated - surely there will be no really good and reasonably priced alternative. Assuming I was going to be forced to use mspaint, I found paint.net -> http://www.getpaint.net <- This is a project that grew from a college project mentored by Microsoft and does a remarkable job. Take into account the fact that it is FREE, and so far, has been able to do whatever I used Photoshop for, and I have just saved $1,155.

Now, if only there was a way for me to uninstall Adobe Flash player...

K Blog : Web

Isn't that some kind of dodgy mud hut?